An Interview with Mark McGurl

One of the most influential recent accounts of literary minimalism comes from Mark McGurl, now the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Stanford University. His The Program Era, originally published in 2009, established the keywords with which a generation of scholars has begun to consider minimalist writing in the context of higher education, class, and craft. In that book, McGurl situated the canonization of minimalist fiction writers like Raymond Carver in the U.S. in the 1970s-1980 as effects of the post-war rise of MFA programs and, more broadly, United States universities' incorporation of people from a wider range of class positions with such developments as the G.I. Bill. That argument has been extended and revised in the past decade, as a number of scholars have taken into account such geographic, generic, and temporal matters as the transnational circulation of writing, the importance of poetry, and the afterlives of minimalist craft during neoliberalism's long ascent into the 21st century. Last year, McGurl added to that body of work by extending his account of minimalism in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, which showed how the institution of the online marketplace has reshaped the minimalist fiction he first saw birthed in the institution of the university.

Over e-mail in October 2022, we interviewed McGurl on his thinking about minimalisms now, including their imbrication with race, affect, and aesthetics.

Mark McGurl is the author of The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (2001), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) and, most recently, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021).

C&M: We thought to begin this conversation by asking, predictably: What is minimalism now? How does the minimalist impulse manifest in the twenty-first century—in and, if you like, beyond the literary—and who are its main practitioners?

Forms of minimalism are everywhere. They are responses to an otherwise overwhelmingly maximalist culture, a culture of more, more, more. A hyper-capitalist culture, that is. A hyper-mediated, hyper-stimulating, hyper emotionally demanding culture. In dialectical rejoinder to which we find various forms of voluntary simplicity, aesthetic and otherwise. The specific form of any given minimalism will depend on what manifestation of the maximal it is trying to manage. It will also depend on the social positionality of the persons under pressure. For instance, the term "voluntary simplicity" emerges in the context of environmentalism and implies unconstrained access, otherwise, to a mass of wasteful consumer goods. Needless to say there are still plenty of people in the world living lives of involuntary simplicity. Likewise, the post-industrial minimalist architectural aesthetic, the Dwell Magazine thing, is an haute-bourgeois phenomenon, to judge from its price-point. I'm less certain of the social derivation of things like Chill Indie Beats playlists and other forms of musically "dialing it down," which are obviously part of a much broader array of soothing musical forms. All these minimalisms are quite distinct, some more political than others, but all should be considered in a wider context of incessant demand for emotional and other forms of labor.

The key point is that, when thinking about minimalism, one also wants always also be thinking about maximalism, the more to minimalism's less. Together, they are the drivers of an embodied aesthetic economy.

Specifically literary minimalisms can likewise be differentiated by the circumstances of their production and circulation. In the contemporary literary field, what we have come to call "autofiction" is perhaps the most conspicuous extension of a minimalist tradition dating back at least to the early 20^th century, to the roman a clef mode of Ernest Hemingway, where the author-figure was never very well disguised. A more socially diverse enterprise than it once was, autofiction emerges in the broader social environment of what we call "literary fiction," which also has its maximalist variants, and is mainly of interest to liberal college graduates. In more popular precincts of the literary field, one might point to the romance novel as a kind of minimalist form dedicated to the symbolic forging the small world of the romantic couple.

Famously, in The Program Era you call minimalism part of "lower-middle-class modernism," in particular embodying the shame that authors might have experienced when incorporated into the formerly elite institution of the University. The minimalist writer's attention to craft both provides a sense of control and a fantasy of unalienated labor, particularly at a time when the office is increasingly a primary scene of labor. We wondered if you might reflect on the afterlife of minimalism in the context of the rise, not of the office, but of two other shifts in labor, notably the generalization of service labor and the hustle of the gig economy in the age of Uber. Does minimalism continue to provide a sense of control, or what we might call the relaxation of Zen, as a relief from the stresses of the 24/7 hustle?

If we are thinking of things from the point of view of the literary producer, the writer or would-be writer, I think that the rise of the service and, more specifically, gig economies to which you refer has changed the game somewhat. Speaking abstractly, the meditative brevities and cool simplicities that characterized 1970s minimalism have been subsumed by the logic of speedy serial delivery. The relatively short forms of which minimalism is so often constituted testify, not to the opportunity for the exertion of aesthetic self-control, but to the imperative to provide new products relatively quickly under conditions of time-famine. Rather than a form of temporary removal from the state of harried alienation, the minimalist short story now converges with other short forms of self-expression, the genres native to the digital platform: the post, the tweet, the take, the text. This possibility has always been latent in minimalism, I suppose. If things are short there can be more of them. There is no way out of the dialectic. Because "less" and "more" are co-constituted, complexly interpenetrating values, the one will always be lying in wait behind the other, ready to ironize it. That said, in some contexts, the minimalist mode in literature no doubt still facilitates an aesthetic of therapeutic self-control and even a politics of refusal.

In your most recent book, Everything and Less, you center the Age of Amazon rather than the Program Era for understanding recent fiction. From this perspective, a history of the contemporary novel needs to contend not just with the MFA's literary fiction, but primarily with the popular genre fictions Amazon sells most. In genre fiction, you say, the maximal/minimal dialectic—and the pride/shame dialectic of emotions they respectively incarnate—is more accurately understood as a dialectic of epic/romance: "The first is geared to world-expanding sprawl and exhilarating ongoingness in the exploration of historical or pseudo-historical reality. The second is geared to world-consolidating completion in the 'small world' of marriage or excision of the criminal element from the (literal or figurative) village social body." But these categories, you note, are not mutually exclusive. In fact, you identify a number of generic iterations between them. Would you be able to speak a little bit about the ways in which the minimal informs these iterations?

It was during the writing of Everything and Less that I realized both how long in historical duration the minimalist/maximalist dialectic has been and also how pervasive it is in contemporary culture, not least in the domain of popular genre fiction. That realization is embodied in the title of the book, which plays with Amazon's self-nomination as the "Everything Store" and with a cultural history driven by an aesthetic economy of more and less played out on any number of levels of aesthetic experience. Because of my specific interest in fictional narrative, the term "epic" and "romance" seemed the most useful designations of two competing but, yes, also interpenetrating modes. I give the example in passing of contemporary epic fantasy such as we find it in George R. R. Martin or Brandon Sanderson. On the one hand, judging by the girth of their works, one would have to say they are epic explorations of massively built worlds and pseudo-histories. By the same token, their pseudo-medieval settings facilitate a series of striking symbolic simplifications, not least of the contemporary media-sphere and information economy. Pseudo-medieval de-mediation is surely part of the pleasure they provide to readers and viewers— ironically of course, given their multimedia existence. Postapocalyptic narratives, which I discuss in the book at much greater length, work in the same way. A more literary example would be Karl Ove Knausgaard. The six volumes of My Struggle are so typical of autofictional minimalism in their narrow focus on the barely-fictionalized personal life of a writer—and yet their cumulative hugeness cannot be denied. It is some sort of epic.

We need to ask you about affect specifically, which, of course, informs much of your work on literary style. As we noted in the CFP for "Minimalisms Now," recent scholarship in queer of color critique has helped both to situate the whiteness and maleness of minimalism's historical allure and to theorize how a minimal performance of affect might be a counterhegemonic practice for people of color. We observe this, for instance, in what Xine Yao has called "unfeeling," Tina Post has identified as "black inexpression," or Sunny Xiang has named "Asian inscrutability." Might these or other forms of minimal affect fit into or else nuance the pride/shame dichotomy as you conceived it in the Program Era?

Certainly. In fact, I think one can see clear antecedents to the practice of minimalism-as-resistance going back several decades. One of my favorites is William Melvin Kelley's novel, A Different Drummer, from 1969. It is a strikingly matter-of-fact narration of a fictional event of mass refusal: the sudden, unexplained exodus in the Civil Rights era of every single Black person from a Southern state. Another amazing example is Andrea Lee's novel Sarah Phillips, published in the heyday of Carverian minimalism in 1984. It is comprised of linked minimalist stories narrated by a young female member of the Black bourgeoisie—a character's whose relative privilege constantly disrupts any easy identification on her part with "Black experience" as such. I can't do justice to the complexity of these examples here, but they establish the viability of minimalism as a mode of resistance to the compulsory maximalism of Voice—to, that is, the idea that the only appropriate response to historical silencing is to speak intensely emotionally. Persons of color are routinely asked to perform a certain kind of emotional labor, and just as routinely paid for this labor in the currency of contempt. The appeal of minimalism in this context is clear.

We have a couple questions following up on this sense of minimalism's racialization. In his contribution to Loren Glass's After the Program Era, for which you provided an afterword, Matthew Blackwell considers how Gordon Lish was inspired by James Purdy's prose as he edited Carver's, but whereas in Purdy minimalism expresses the "silencing of racial and sexual minorities," the reticence produced in Carver's minimalism through Lish's editing is de-politicized (113). We wonder if you agree with that insight in the context of minimalism now, when it might be less the effect of an apolitical editor and as much an effect of platforms and genres like Twitter and the microblog. As we also know, many of these short forms of writing have also provided community for writers otherwise on the margins of mainstream publishing: we think of Black Twitter and queer Tumblr, for instance. How do you read minimalism now, and its sites of proliferation, as an allegory or a technique for interrupting wider systems of marginalization?

I'm not sure I'm tracking this question fully, but if the suggestion is that minimalist forms aren't necessarily apolitical or de-politicized now, as they may have been in the mid-20^th century, I can only agree. For my money, with Twitter, the maximalism of the platform is overwhelmingly more salient than the brevity of its textual components, which are always subsumed in the feed. The overall effect is of unfocused chatter and free-flowing aggression—precisely the things to which minimalism is a response. That said, there is no denying its community-building affordances and the political agency that might emanate therefrom. For instance, #metoo is such a tiny utterance, but it has meant a lot.

You earlier read minimalism less as an expression of whiteness and more as its aspiration: to become "actually and fully possessed of the inherited privileges that this term symbolizes in a racist society" (319). This aspiration for a basic humanity is minimalism's "universality," at the same time that minimalism flaunts its own "dependency and weakness" on postwar institutions, "revealing the systematicity of creativity in the Program Era in its starkest form. In doing so, it lays bare the recruitment of that creativity to the inhuman ends of the economic order we serve" (320). We wonder about the extent to which, in a contemporary global context, you think minimalism now encodes whiteness and by extension its universalism. We're thinking, for instance, of minimalism's association, from a Western perspective, with Japanese aesthetics, from sleek lines in clothing to the discourse of Zen to the lifestyle advice of Marie Kondo. What do you see about the relations among minimalism, universalism, and Orientalism broadly conceived?

Yes, I think my formulation of minimalism-as-"whiteness"-as-"aspiration to full humanity" was relatively specific to the case of Raymond Carver and to a certain extent to his generation of white working-class writers. Things look different when one opens the lens to take in more historical data. It is quite clear, as you suggest, that early-20^th century modernist minimalisms in the West were crucially enabled by the example of Japanese aesthetics—the haiku being, in the world history of poetry, one of the original minimalist forms. It was famously perceived by Pound and others as an "imagist" antidote to Victorian rhetorical scrollwork. And now Marie Kondo. I suppose the national origin of the call to purge things that do not "spark joy" can't be entirely accidental. That said, the obviously transcultural, if not quite universal, appeal of Japanese minimalism points to its being one manifestation of a global realization that sometimes less is more.

By the same token, it would be hard to convince anyone that, for instance, manga is a minimalist aesthetic form. Manga is usually chromatically simple, but where printing circumstances permit it suddenly becomes luridly colorful. In either case it is frenetically visually crowded and broadly, spastically emotive. This suggests that we should be very cautious with national cultural stereotypes in approaching the meaning of contemporary minimalisms, if only because of the insistently dialectical nature of the minimalism/maximalism dyad in every case. Certainly, we need to situate minimalisms in specific cultural contexts, but we should always expect those contexts to be complicated because the world itself is complicated, not simple. Hence the appeal of the minimalism in the first place.